How the simple appeal of money makes it near impossible to explain what real money is to the Citizenry

For the overwhelming number of people out there – stretching well into 3-figure IQs – the technicalities and varieties of ‘money’ are of no interest whatsoever. They don’t get it and they don’t care that they don’t get it. It bores the living crap out of them. Money for them is something you want enough of if possible, but not none of. That’s it, period, the end.

For the majority of Westerners , the important things in life are enjoying the comfort and safety of the tribe, a warm room below a dry roof, kids, shopping, sports, media entertainment and holidays. For almost all of this, one needs money….but getting it and then carrying on as usual is infinitely more important than the process of getting it and what it costs.

A few things learned while researching consumer consumption of debt:

1. Blue collar people ask only one question about an unsecured loan: “how much are the repayments per month?”

2. Over 90% of all mortgage consumers haven’t the faintest idea how ridiculous the sum they’re going to have to pay over 20-25 years actually is.

3. Under 17% of credit card users can tell you to within 5 basis points what interest they’re paying on unpaid balances.

In short, the sole concern is getting the wonga and then having what the other tribe members have got….see earlier.

The truly fascinating fact however is that they not only know others are more conversant with money technicals, they respect these people. The wiseasses at Zero Hedge, naked capitalism, Wikileaks, Wolf Richter, Max Keiser et al can poke fun at the Fed, Wall Street, George Osborne, Mario Draghi and Schäuble until the cows land after jumping over the Moon: most consumers think the authorities know their stuff. If Wolfie says the Greeks borrowed a whole pile of money and then ran off without paying, then that’s what happened.

Three western citizens in four believe that “money you’ve earned and paid tax on is money. Debt is not money you have, it’s money you owe. All borrowers must repay what they owe”. Any other view is needless over-complication.

Two generations of narrowly educated and media obsessed kids learned in turn from their parents that rich is better than poor, and being famous and ‘larging it’ is great…..but there is no such thing as a free lunch.

You can transmit all of the following to citizens, and it will have zero effect:

* Money as a term has been perverted miles beyond paper and coinage

* Fractional Reserve Banking creates ‘money’ out of thin air

* The Fed is in a corner, the UK Treasury’s debt is unsustainable, and the euro’s real value is barely above toilet tissue

* Fiat currency is not a car and it isn’t money either – it’s an empty promise

* QE has nothing to do with real life economics, and the current ‘inflation’ is not real inflation (yet)

* Get out there and buy some assets before bailins steal (or printing makes worthless) your promisory paper

* Your governments and central banks are lying to you….there is no recovery, there is only a global slump.

3. The distractive power of main/old media is massive – and largely in the hands of those who have a vested interest in nobody getting educated about any of this stuff.

The bottom line becomes, “A bunch of paranoid troublemakers are trying to disturb my simple life here (safely protected by the tribe) with a lot of dense thoughts and complicated ideas designed to bamboozle me. David Cameron [or whoever] is sticking to his guns, and that’s what we need because we’re in a crisis – we’re all in this together, and we won’t get out of it by being divided.”

Put 24/7 news confusion, short attention spans, a simplistic idea of money and bogey men into the pie, and a worrying proportion of almost any electorate are ready to eat it, without realising how humbled they are in doing so.

Yes, there IS a majority out there against the neolib view of life, because consequences have already taught many of them that they’re going to struggle bigtime to survive. But these are the four problems I discern:

§ Most of those being screwed gave up voting years ago, or are approaching dementia

§ Those against the greedy piggies are themselves tribally divided, and unwilling to engage in inter-tribe alliances

§ The passive acceptors grasp so little of the scam involved, they’ll vote for ‘the Big Society’ or whatever other complete cobblers those hijacking the liberal democracy model come up with

§ Governments will work harder and harder – in conjunction with old media, ISPs and the Security Services – to develop the idea that most if not all ‘NVEs’ are not thinking dissenters, but pernicious wreckers. Such defined people will get guilt, fear and if necessary criminal charges and prison sentences to dissuade them from continuing to dissent.

In that context, The considered Internet Opposition doesn’t stand a chance…..and may well anyway be undermined from within by its own Hard Left hijackers with their archaic Trotspeak of smash this, kill that and eat the other. Grist, let’s face it, to the NVE mill.

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I’m reaching the point now where I think the only solution is to stop trying to explain ‘how’ or ‘why’, and instead start asserting ‘what’. That’s to say – to strike at the core of what the end result of all this is going to take away from regular tribe members with an average level of life-enhancing privileges. These core items are, quite obviously, loans, houses, cars, clothes, holidays, and meals out….with education, health and pensions coming a very poor equal last.

The ordinary People of Greece are way ahead of the curve on this one….as are the Portuguese, Spaniards and – soon enough – the Italians. They don’t need to be told what an iniquity the enormous power transfer from labour to capital is. But for the citizens of the United States, Britain and non-ClubMed EU members, the threat to their existing, emerging or former lifestyles needs to be as focused as the claptrap being vomited out by the other side.

I do not have the perfect aperture, gripping theme, Big Idea or ‘promotional mechanic’ as to how this can be achieved. I just think positive dissenters should be coming together and looking for media quid pro quos…..so we can wind up having (for example) the same persuasive power as that of the Globalist/EU/Special Relationship/Neoliberal axis of corrupt falsehood we would all prefer to leave.

17 thoughts on “How the simple appeal of money makes it near impossible to explain what real money is to the Citizenry”

I came to understand these arguments when I found that I had no money and had to think about my situation.
Now that I have that angle covered and understand, if only in simple, self-centred terms, it gets worse.
My pacemaker is halfway through its design life of 6 years.
I don’t need a reminder that events are coming to a head.
Most others do.

“Governments will work harder and harder – in conjunction with old media, ISPs and the Security Services – to develop the idea that most if not all ‘NVEs’ are not thinking dissenters, but pernicious wreckers. Such defined people will get guilt, fear and if necessary criminal charges and prison sentences to dissuade them from continuing to dissent.”

Governments have always done this. The only opposition to their predations have been the very organisations that were demonised and ridiculed during the 70’s and 80’s, the labour unions. The demise of organised labour, allowed and even facilitated by a gullible public that were trained by blanket propaganda to see them as ‘anti-innovation’ and dinosaurs, rather than as a necessary brake on rapacious capitalism, has left decent people undefended from the assault of the globalist, neocon/neolib, Friedmanite gangsters.

In my view, the only way to oppose these psychopaths is to use individual conversations in social situations to persuade individuals one at a time, and to point them towards alternative perspectives such as this one. I have found that many are far more receptive if approached in the right manner, although I agree it is an uphill struggle. If someone respects and trusts you in other realms, it is a much easier task to sidestep the NVE designation. The biggest problem is that people do not have the time to follow up and verify facts, or expose themselves to different ‘extremist’ ideas. A paradigm shift in thinking does not come easily. An ‘critical mass’ accumulation of provable lies is required to wean someone off the mainstream media, and even then, the brainwashing is sometimes too effective.

It’s more than a tribe, nature falls down in the hundreds… Society, if you believe in it, is ours & ours alone. A reality we create, embroider & glorify. The people really do want, what the people get, fortunately I believe more & more are “Getting it”, or rather, becoming insightful… I rather hope we can find the middle road between Fighting or running away, both are truly reactions of psychotic or depressive madness. Action at odds with the protestant work ethic is imperative. Weaving sense into a history of unconsidered ego driven self aggrandised “Doing”, will not need knee jerks, It will require the action of waiting & consideration IMHO.

You are spot on with the Greeks & to a lesser but useful degree the PI_S too, they are not annoyed or angry, they do harbour cold rage. In the Creten’s case a millennial+, history of surviving foreign fiddling, they still have the living knowledge to survive in an older way, the family & land to keep fed & they know stoicism like they invented it.

I really think there is stuff in History to use. Succeeding against imperialism & apartheid seem to point in the right direction to me. Softly softly.

We could always decide to fuse the campaign of Exit with a radical version of Buddhist protest. Senior Suicide Citizens, that might bring a bit of age respect back into society?

I am potless but i live eat and breathe your slog, In most of your posts there is so much more right than wrong anyone who does not agree is an idiot. I am 69 I remember GB before Euorpe and it was great ok had its probs don;t we all but my goodness we had it all. and now we are giving away 12 bilion to people who (might/might not) need it, and we all know their governments are syphoning it off for themselves. our homes are drowning , their occupants are becoming homeless people, I have decide compared to the past pre BLAIR We are now governed by first class pricks.

had my nephews over for boxing day, they would be classed as working class, low education late twenties. Neither drink or smoke, they are both self employed. The conversation got onto politics and the state of the nation very quickly. You cant pull the wool over these eyes, there is so much more brooding underneath. They know they are being screwed and they know who is doing the screwing. Yes you are correct they lack the knowledge to understand why, but they learn very quickly. We all learn quickly when we are threatened directly. Contrast wiith my own age group, family and friends who are a mixed bag of mostly middle class relatively well off professional people. I see the enlightened and the frightened, those who understand and those who are scared silly. The message is getting through it just takes time. For myself, I believe Mars just keeps getting closer.

he thundering herd has been increasingly tamed and indoctrinated by a uniform crescendo of “proper-think”. “News” has gone from information to entertainment to outright propaganda aimed at putting the masses to political sleep. Former bastions of independent thought, such as liberal arts university faculty, have adopted political correctness, post-modernism, and perverse Social Justice Warrior tyranny as the dTesired norm. Education has abandoned basic learning, language skills, mathematics, cursive writing, and other brain-taxing activities for domestication and social conformity. Testing is eschewed as elitist, judgmental, and damaging to children’s egos. Basic grammar was lost more than a generation ago, and teachers now employ crude argot such as “Me and my mom went to the store”. I have to cringe when I hear “university-educated” people speak so ignorantly.
Critical thinking is becoming a rare skill, and is regarded as subversive when employed.
Young people of the privileged Western societies see reality as what comes to them from a hand-held screen, to which they are addicted.
The Beatles came out with a song, “Working Class Hero”. Voltaire wrote Candide, featuring a half-assed nun riding a donkey about the world as Candide observed the inanities and hypocrisies of the then age. The pearls of wisdom are lying about for the swine to consume, but go untouched. We regard ourselves as the most intelligent species on Earth. Gawd help us.
A principle ascribed to the slave-owners of the Old South was that once a generation of slaves was convinced that slavery was the natural order, with slaves lacking the ability to run their own lives and needing Ole Massa to look out for them, the slave owners had it made – the slaves would pass this idea on to their children, who would pass it on to their children, etc. The working classes in Great Britain were similarly convinced that the toffs were naturally endowed with the wisdom and intelligence to run the nation, and the working classes were not so endowed. It took the useless wastage of life and treasure in WW1 to disabuse the people of the notion that the toffs knew how to run the world. But the Powers That Be have upped their game and now hide in the shadows while the masses toil on in the illusions of freedom, political power through the ballot box, and material progress. Our institutions seem to be ideal breeding grounds for sociopaths and psychopaths, and are usually run by such.

I wonder what the current generations in the Western World will pass on to their children. The more I learn of the reality of human society, the more difficult it is to avoid dark depression. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, after all.

The trouble with money (a kind of wealth indicator) is that 10% of the population have 90% of it, leaving 90% of the population to share the remaining 10%.
Now, those figures are not be exact, but you get the idea.
That rich 10% may argue they’re entitled to it because they did things to earn it.
This may be so in many cases, but my big beef is that it stinks when considering the mega bucks paid to some top end CEOs. How can anyone justify paying any CEO any more than 3 million dollars a year? Even that’s far too much for any one person to be paid.
It’s morally wrong when considering the number of people in poverty.
I’m sure many CEOs earn a reasonable amount, and are worth every bit of it, but not those on mega salaries, it just isn’t right.

The concept of money is simple, but the explanations are overly complex. Some parts of the world only value commodities because they are real. Others only value money because they believe in its promise. Who is correct?

well u see john that you are one of the guilty. I speak in terms of the demonization of the NVE types. I am an NVE type and I am a Christian. I Know , but not as well with the detailed knowledge that you have, that the general public has been sold a real pup when they are encouraged to just keep their noses to the grindstones and let the ” professionals” worry about Markets , exchange rates and other things they don’t understand. and that there are virtually no political parties that have the a real knowledge or plan to pull their own people out of the mess. So voting Tory Or Labour or UKIP or in the US Republican or Democratic, with have no effect on the economic markets because none of the banksters will loosen up the screws in the least bit.( see Greece) It does not matter what one is selling if no one can afford to buy, and we are a long way form all living on the farm where we can take care of our own basic needs. So John U r concerned because you feel that the Camoron types are upset at bloggers who point out that what they are trying to peddle to the public is even worse than a bag of old bollocks, it is an empty bag which contains nothing at all.
We’ve got out own problems at the moment. People here like Trump, because he says basically that we don’t need johnny foreigner and the load of troubles he brings, just let us get rid of all these outsiders and square away things here at home. Of course he doesn’t talk about things like greedy international banksters, and debt to earning ratios, or the fact that withoiut tarrifs or other trade equalizers we cant stop bleeding to death. but still he is number one in the polls, with his simplistic rants. beating out, 3 to one, Ben Carson Who DOES have a handle on these things

What is needed is an absolutely stable currency that never gains in value or loses its value.
This would give everyone a comfortable feeling about saving, investing, buying property etc
Continuous changes in buying power only benefit a clever minority get rich by using
their knowledge